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ARTWORK INFO

ARTIST INFO

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Jennida Chase and Hassan Pitts work under the moniker of S/N, which is an interdisciplinary art group. They work within video, sound, animation, photography, and new media. Jennida and Hassan crossed paths in 2007 while attending graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University, and have been creating collaborative work since 2008. Both completed their MFAs in 2009. Their works have been exhibited and screened internationally in various festivals, galleries and museums including Hong Kong Art Fair, Pekin Fine Arts, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art DAS Weekend and the Freies Museum in Berlin. In 2014 were finalists for the MacArthur Grant in Documentary Film for The Richmond Recollection Project, in 2015 S/N were awarded the William A. Minor Grant and in 2016 received the Pollination Seed Grant. In 2017 they received The Puffin Grant. In 2017 their new short The Fawn received an award for Best Experimental Film in the Paris Play Festival. Jennida & Hassan currently reside in Illinois where Hassan is currently serving as the Executive Director of the Big Muddy Film Festival and Technology Coordinator for the College of Mass Communication and Media Art at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Jennida teaches filmmaking in Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Department of Cinema & Photography, where in 2017 she was awarded the University Level Early Career Faculty Excellence Award.

The Fawn is a collaborative, intergenerational storytelling project for the 21st century. This social media born, expanded cinema work unites art and life through the reinvention and the magical realism of a child’s imagination, who is constantly stuck at her parent’s work, and she moves to another level with Snapchat. The Fawn is a no budget work that utilizes free mobile applications to explore character and contemporary issues in ecology through the whimsical perspective of childhood.

The Fawn gets separated from her parents while searching for clean water. She encounters deforestation which drives her further into the forest where she meets all manor of creatures before discovering the heart of the forest where there is clean water. The film uses common technology and free mobile applications to weave a fantastical hero’s journey as she traverses modern ecological crises.

"The most important part about tomorrow is not the technology or the automation, but that man is going to come into entirely new relationships with his fellow men. He will retain much more in his everyday life of what we term the naïveté and idealism of the child. I think the way to see what tomorrow is going to look like is just to look at our children." --Buckminster Fuller